Colorado Trail-Runner Attacked From Behind by Mountain Lion;
Kills It With His Bare Hands, Strangling It

The story's been out since February 4, but the guy finally sat down for a interview and told his story.

Audio at the link. Here's some of the story.

He's officially 0% soy.

The 31-year-old -- at 5 feet, 10 inches tall and 150 pounds -- skipped the earbuds on this run, opting instead for the sound of his own footsteps. A quarter-mile into his descent from Towers, he heard pine needles rustling on the trail behind him.

"I stopped and turned," he said. "And it's one of those situations where sometimes I turn, sometimes I don't. But in the back of my mind I always wonder if it's something dangerous like a bear or a bobcat or a mountain lion, and in this case it was in fact a mountain lion.

"So I remember seeing that and just having my gut feel the full impact of the situation."

The approximately 80-pound juvenile cougar barreled toward him. Kauffman put up his arms and screamed in an attempt to scare the cat away.

"Unfortunately, it kept running," he said.

The cat leapt at Kauffman's face. He raised his arms in a defensive motion to blunt the initial attack. Its mouth locked around his wrist. One tooth sunk into the meaty part of his thumb, another dug into the top of his wrist.

The mountain lion hugged Kauffman's body, digging its front claws into his back. Its back legs thrashed at his thighs. He tried to throw it off. But with its mouth clamped around his wrist, the two ended up tumbling more than 20 feet off the trail into a gully.

"But during that fall, the cat ended up on its back and it still had my wrist this whole time in its mouth," Kauffman said.

With the leverage of being on top of the cougar, Kauffman used one of his legs to pin the animal's hindquarters to the ground, and then searched for a way to fight back. He grabbed sticks, but they were rotted, and crumbled when he tried to use them against the cat. With his free hand, he found a rock and began hitting its head. The angle was awkward and Kauffman let the cat's legs slip out from under him.

...

He was able to repin the mountain lion's legs with his left leg and swung the other around to the cat's throat.

"I got my right foot onto its neck," he said. "And then I was able to get some weight onto its windpipe and that's what eventually suffocated it."

Only when the cat was dead did it release Kauffman's wrist from its mouth.

The whole battle lasted about ten minutes.

There's a little more to this story, as a Twitter source reports:

posted by Ace of Spades at 02:02 PM

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